David E. Shaw is a computer scientist who founded the quantitative investment firm D. E. Shaw & Co. in 1988 and now works mainly as chief scientist of D. E. Shaw Research, a computational biochemistry lab.
David E. Shaw is a computer scientist who founded the quantitative investment firm D. E. Shaw & Co. in 1988 and now works mainly as chief scientist of D. E. Shaw Research, a computational biochemistry lab.
Shaw was born in 1951 and raised in Los Angeles. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of California, San Diego, and a PhD from Stanford University in 1980, then taught in the computer science department at Columbia University, where he worked on massively parallel computing, until 1986.
In 1986 he joined Morgan Stanley as vice president for technology in Nunzio Tartaglia's automated proprietary trading group. Two years later he started D. E. Shaw & Co., which used computer models to trade securities. He directed the firm until 2001; in 2002 he stepped back from day-to-day involvement and handed management to an executive committee of senior managing directors. The firm says he remains involved in some higher-level strategic decisions, and its Form ADV lists him as sole stockholder, chairman and president of D. E. Shaw & Co., Inc., the general partner of the advisory business.
Since 2001 his main work has been research into the molecular dynamics of proteins using computer simulation, at D. E. Shaw Research, which he founded. He is a senior research fellow and adjunct professor at Columbia, has twice been appointed to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences.
Sources · written 23 October 2026